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Space Cases: The Weirdest Legal Claims in Outer Space
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/06/space-cases/
By Adam Mann
In January, a Quebec man named Sylvio Langvein walked into a courthouse in Canada and filed a suit declaring himself owner of the planets in our solar system, four of Jupiter’s moons, and the interplanetary space between. By way of explanation, Langvein said he wanted to collect planets the same way that others collect hockey cards, and also prevent China from establishing outposts above his head. The judge overseeing the case, Alain Michaud, dismissed it in March, calling Langvein a “quarrelsome litigant” whose paranoid actions were an abuse of the Canadian legal system. (This was Langvein’s 45th lawsuit — including four motions to the Supreme Court of Canada — since 2001).
“Every now and then, someone thinks no one has claimed the moon before, and then rushes to claim it,” wrote Virgiliu Pop, a space law researcher at the Romanian Space Agency. “Humankind has a short collective memory, so the claimant is able to create some buzz before the story dies out — to be followed by a similar story, years later.” As we enter an era when people are seriously advocating that the U.S. establish property rights on the moon and scholars debate the legality of mining asteroids, it’s interesting (and relevant) to look back at the people who have tried to assert ownership of the moon, Mars, other planets, and stars throughout history. In 2006, Pop literally wrote a book on this matter, titled Unreal Estate: The Men Who Sold The Moon, which he describes as “a serious analysis of a trivial subject.” Here we look at some of the book’s most spurious and strange space cases.
But one of the earliest modern cases where such claims are made comes from King Frederick the Great, who ruled Prussia in the mid-1700s. The king was said to have sought help from a great healer named Aul Jurgens and, in exchange for the miraculous cures he received, bequeathed the moon to Jurgen’s family until the end of time. This story comes from one of Jurgen’s descendants, Martin, who in 1996 tried to claim lunar ownership through his illustrious ancestor. The next year, scholars at the Institute for Air and Space Law in the Netherlands denied Jurgen’s claim on the grounds that the donation by a Prussian sovereign who didn’t actually own the moon in the first place wasn’t valid.
One night in 1936, A. Dean Lindsay looked up at the moon and thought to himself, “Nobody owns it!” Seeking to rectify this situation, Lindsay marched into the Pittsburgh Notary Public office and presented a document declaring that he owned “[a]ll of the property known as planets, islands-of-space or other matter, henceforth to be known as ‘A.D. Lindsay’s archapellago.’” Lindsay’s misspelled archipelago included every planet visible from any other planet or mass in space but omitted three bodies: the Earth, moon, and Saturn. The Earth, Lindsay reasoned, belonged to its inhabitants, but he drew up separate documents declaring himself owner of the moon and Saturn. (Why these two bodies in particular needed separate deeds, no one really knows.) He also registered the documents with the Irwin County Court House in Ocilla, Georgia.
James Thomas Mangan was, according to his autobiography, “an internationally famous speaker, a world champion top spinner, and one of the best grass cutters in America.” He was also founder of the Nation of Celestial Space, which he created in Evergreen Park, Illinois in 1949. The country laid claim to everything in space. Mangan presented the Charter of Celestia to the Recorder of Deeds and Titles of Cook County, Illinois, an occasion recorded by numerous media. Mangan sent letters to 74 nations inviting them to give him official recognition and applied for membership with the UN in 1948. The UN rejected his application. Over the years, Mangan needed to defend his nation’s sovereignty over space from several other contestants, including a student from Tennessee who registered the “southern half of outer space” and an inmate in Alcatraz who claimed his grandfather had been charged rent for sunlight by Austrian Emperor Franz Josef. Mangan also fought with the USSR, protesting that the launch of Sputnik in 1957 was trespassing on his territory, and was angered that the U.S. didn’t ask his permission to send Surveyor cameras to the moon in 1966. But he was also generous with his powers, issuing a license for banking on the moon to the president of Chicago’s Beverly Bank and presenting official moon passports to the Apollo astronauts. Though Mangan died in 1970, he passed control of Celestia to his son, James, and his daughter, Ruth. His grandchildren currently oversee the nation.
On Nov. 22, 1980, Dennis Hope registered the moon. In the “Declaration of Ownership” he filed with the San Francisco County office, he claimed that he would forever be known as “the omnipitant [sic] ruler of the lighted lunar surface,” with “the exalted title of, ‘The Head Cheese.’” Hope also registered a business, the Lunar Embassy, and sent copies of his declaration to the U.S., USSR, and UN, along with a $55,000 storage and littering bill. Then Hope did what any entrepreneur would: He started selling off his property, acre by acre. In the first years, the company sold 3,500 properties on the moon. But with better word-of-mouth and the advent of the internet, Lunar Embassy’s business began to boom. Hope now claims to have 3.6 million property owners in 181 countries, including George Lucas, Ron Howard, Carrie Fisher, members of royal families in six countries, two former U.S. presidents, and several astronauts. You can get an acre for the low, low price of about $20! While Hope’s claim contradicts international space laws, Lunar Embassy is still in operation and is even selling .moon domain names as well as entire moons in the outer solar system.
The site MoonCertificate.com doesn’t rely on any silly Earth governments for its right to the moon. Claiming to be the “only lunar land deed site authorized by the true owners of the moon,” the site derives its authority from the Martian Council of Kings. The site claims Martian “greys” established lunar property rights 7.2 million years ago and later contacted the website’s owner, allowing them to sell off certificates of ownership.
After NASA’s Pathfinder mission landed on Mars in 1997, the event drew legal ire from a group of Yemenites. According to Arabic news sources, three men — Adam Ismail, Mustafa Khalil, and Abdullah al-Umari — wanted to sue the agency for trespassing. Filing a lawsuit with the Yemeni Prosecutor General, the trio argued that they inherited the planet from their ancestors 3,000 years prior, according to mythologies of the ancient Sabaean and Himyaritic civilizations. The trio demanded the immediate suspension of NASA’s Martian operations and an information blackout on data collected about the Martian atmosphere, gravity, and surface. The Prosecutor General dismissed the case, calling the three plaintiffs “abnormal.” After the claim failed, the three men went on to try and sell Martian property at $2 a square meter, though the effort never went very far.
When the NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft touched down on asteroid 433 Eros in 2001, Gregory Nemitz was ready for it. Nemitz claimed the asteroid was under ownership of his company, Orbital Development, which aimed to mine the rocky body. “As a Near-Earth Asteroid, Eros is a potential resource base for construction materials and propellants,” read the property claim, which Nemitz filed with the Archimedes Institute in 2000. It also stated that a recreational tourist facility would be built in the spaces cleared by mining. Nemitz sent NASA an invoice for a parking fee, charging a reasonable $20 per Earth century, due within 21 days of landing. Because Orbital Development had no real legal standing, NASA respectfully declined to pay the fee. NASA and Nemitz went back and forth for several months, with Nemitz claiming that he had legal ownership of Eros because of his property claim while NASA argued the filing had no foundation in law. An angry Nemitz sent a letter to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell with his grievances and, after being told that his claim violated the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, filed a federal court case in Reno, Nevada concerning the “Treaty vs. the Natural, Inherent Rights of Man” to acquire and own property. When that court case was dismissed, Nemitz filed with other federal courts, and briefly considered whether or not to take case to the Supreme Court. He eventually dropped the plan in 2005.
One of the most recent space cases involves Marina Bayross, a Russian spiritualist and astrologer. When she heard that NASA’s Deep Impact mission was going to fire a data-gathering projectile at comet Tempel 1, Bayross was disturbed and feared “that it could have an impact on all humanity.” She brought forth a suit in Russia’s Presnensky District Court in Moscow against NASA, seeking 8.7 billion rubles (about $300 million) in compensation for moral damages. Bayross claimed that the mission was “an encroachment upon the ‘holy of holies’ – my system of life and intellectual values, my faith in the significance of each particle of the universe. This barbarous, arbitrary interference in the natural life of cosmos, and disturbance of the natural balance of forces in the universe, is not permissible.”
Indian astrologers in the 1960s had similarly been angry at the Apollo program, saying the moon was too tainted for use in soothsaying after a man walked on it. The Indonesian island of Bali is also said to have lodged a protest with the UN against the U.S. for desecrating a sacred place. Nothing came of these earlier incidents and Bayross’ suit was eventually dismissed by a higher Russian court.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/06/space-cases/
By Adam Mann
In January, a Quebec man named Sylvio Langvein walked into a courthouse in Canada and filed a suit declaring himself owner of the planets in our solar system, four of Jupiter’s moons, and the interplanetary space between. By way of explanation, Langvein said he wanted to collect planets the same way that others collect hockey cards, and also prevent China from establishing outposts above his head. The judge overseeing the case, Alain Michaud, dismissed it in March, calling Langvein a “quarrelsome litigant” whose paranoid actions were an abuse of the Canadian legal system. (This was Langvein’s 45th lawsuit — including four motions to the Supreme Court of Canada — since 2001).
“Every now and then, someone thinks no one has claimed the moon before, and then rushes to claim it,” wrote Virgiliu Pop, a space law researcher at the Romanian Space Agency. “Humankind has a short collective memory, so the claimant is able to create some buzz before the story dies out — to be followed by a similar story, years later.” As we enter an era when people are seriously advocating that the U.S. establish property rights on the moon and scholars debate the legality of mining asteroids, it’s interesting (and relevant) to look back at the people who have tried to assert ownership of the moon, Mars, other planets, and stars throughout history. In 2006, Pop literally wrote a book on this matter, titled Unreal Estate: The Men Who Sold The Moon, which he describes as “a serious analysis of a trivial subject.” Here we look at some of the book’s most spurious and strange space cases.
But one of the earliest modern cases where such claims are made comes from King Frederick the Great, who ruled Prussia in the mid-1700s. The king was said to have sought help from a great healer named Aul Jurgens and, in exchange for the miraculous cures he received, bequeathed the moon to Jurgen’s family until the end of time. This story comes from one of Jurgen’s descendants, Martin, who in 1996 tried to claim lunar ownership through his illustrious ancestor. The next year, scholars at the Institute for Air and Space Law in the Netherlands denied Jurgen’s claim on the grounds that the donation by a Prussian sovereign who didn’t actually own the moon in the first place wasn’t valid.
One night in 1936, A. Dean Lindsay looked up at the moon and thought to himself, “Nobody owns it!” Seeking to rectify this situation, Lindsay marched into the Pittsburgh Notary Public office and presented a document declaring that he owned “[a]ll of the property known as planets, islands-of-space or other matter, henceforth to be known as ‘A.D. Lindsay’s archapellago.’” Lindsay’s misspelled archipelago included every planet visible from any other planet or mass in space but omitted three bodies: the Earth, moon, and Saturn. The Earth, Lindsay reasoned, belonged to its inhabitants, but he drew up separate documents declaring himself owner of the moon and Saturn. (Why these two bodies in particular needed separate deeds, no one really knows.) He also registered the documents with the Irwin County Court House in Ocilla, Georgia.
James Thomas Mangan was, according to his autobiography, “an internationally famous speaker, a world champion top spinner, and one of the best grass cutters in America.” He was also founder of the Nation of Celestial Space, which he created in Evergreen Park, Illinois in 1949. The country laid claim to everything in space. Mangan presented the Charter of Celestia to the Recorder of Deeds and Titles of Cook County, Illinois, an occasion recorded by numerous media. Mangan sent letters to 74 nations inviting them to give him official recognition and applied for membership with the UN in 1948. The UN rejected his application. Over the years, Mangan needed to defend his nation’s sovereignty over space from several other contestants, including a student from Tennessee who registered the “southern half of outer space” and an inmate in Alcatraz who claimed his grandfather had been charged rent for sunlight by Austrian Emperor Franz Josef. Mangan also fought with the USSR, protesting that the launch of Sputnik in 1957 was trespassing on his territory, and was angered that the U.S. didn’t ask his permission to send Surveyor cameras to the moon in 1966. But he was also generous with his powers, issuing a license for banking on the moon to the president of Chicago’s Beverly Bank and presenting official moon passports to the Apollo astronauts. Though Mangan died in 1970, he passed control of Celestia to his son, James, and his daughter, Ruth. His grandchildren currently oversee the nation.
On Nov. 22, 1980, Dennis Hope registered the moon. In the “Declaration of Ownership” he filed with the San Francisco County office, he claimed that he would forever be known as “the omnipitant [sic] ruler of the lighted lunar surface,” with “the exalted title of, ‘The Head Cheese.’” Hope also registered a business, the Lunar Embassy, and sent copies of his declaration to the U.S., USSR, and UN, along with a $55,000 storage and littering bill. Then Hope did what any entrepreneur would: He started selling off his property, acre by acre. In the first years, the company sold 3,500 properties on the moon. But with better word-of-mouth and the advent of the internet, Lunar Embassy’s business began to boom. Hope now claims to have 3.6 million property owners in 181 countries, including George Lucas, Ron Howard, Carrie Fisher, members of royal families in six countries, two former U.S. presidents, and several astronauts. You can get an acre for the low, low price of about $20! While Hope’s claim contradicts international space laws, Lunar Embassy is still in operation and is even selling .moon domain names as well as entire moons in the outer solar system.
The site MoonCertificate.com doesn’t rely on any silly Earth governments for its right to the moon. Claiming to be the “only lunar land deed site authorized by the true owners of the moon,” the site derives its authority from the Martian Council of Kings. The site claims Martian “greys” established lunar property rights 7.2 million years ago and later contacted the website’s owner, allowing them to sell off certificates of ownership.
After NASA’s Pathfinder mission landed on Mars in 1997, the event drew legal ire from a group of Yemenites. According to Arabic news sources, three men — Adam Ismail, Mustafa Khalil, and Abdullah al-Umari — wanted to sue the agency for trespassing. Filing a lawsuit with the Yemeni Prosecutor General, the trio argued that they inherited the planet from their ancestors 3,000 years prior, according to mythologies of the ancient Sabaean and Himyaritic civilizations. The trio demanded the immediate suspension of NASA’s Martian operations and an information blackout on data collected about the Martian atmosphere, gravity, and surface. The Prosecutor General dismissed the case, calling the three plaintiffs “abnormal.” After the claim failed, the three men went on to try and sell Martian property at $2 a square meter, though the effort never went very far.
When the NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft touched down on asteroid 433 Eros in 2001, Gregory Nemitz was ready for it. Nemitz claimed the asteroid was under ownership of his company, Orbital Development, which aimed to mine the rocky body. “As a Near-Earth Asteroid, Eros is a potential resource base for construction materials and propellants,” read the property claim, which Nemitz filed with the Archimedes Institute in 2000. It also stated that a recreational tourist facility would be built in the spaces cleared by mining. Nemitz sent NASA an invoice for a parking fee, charging a reasonable $20 per Earth century, due within 21 days of landing. Because Orbital Development had no real legal standing, NASA respectfully declined to pay the fee. NASA and Nemitz went back and forth for several months, with Nemitz claiming that he had legal ownership of Eros because of his property claim while NASA argued the filing had no foundation in law. An angry Nemitz sent a letter to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell with his grievances and, after being told that his claim violated the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, filed a federal court case in Reno, Nevada concerning the “Treaty vs. the Natural, Inherent Rights of Man” to acquire and own property. When that court case was dismissed, Nemitz filed with other federal courts, and briefly considered whether or not to take case to the Supreme Court. He eventually dropped the plan in 2005.
One of the most recent space cases involves Marina Bayross, a Russian spiritualist and astrologer. When she heard that NASA’s Deep Impact mission was going to fire a data-gathering projectile at comet Tempel 1, Bayross was disturbed and feared “that it could have an impact on all humanity.” She brought forth a suit in Russia’s Presnensky District Court in Moscow against NASA, seeking 8.7 billion rubles (about $300 million) in compensation for moral damages. Bayross claimed that the mission was “an encroachment upon the ‘holy of holies’ – my system of life and intellectual values, my faith in the significance of each particle of the universe. This barbarous, arbitrary interference in the natural life of cosmos, and disturbance of the natural balance of forces in the universe, is not permissible.”
Indian astrologers in the 1960s had similarly been angry at the Apollo program, saying the moon was too tainted for use in soothsaying after a man walked on it. The Indonesian island of Bali is also said to have lodged a protest with the UN against the U.S. for desecrating a sacred place. Nothing came of these earlier incidents and Bayross’ suit was eventually dismissed by a higher Russian court.
